A modulator-demodulator (modem) is a hardware device including a transceiver which modulates one or more carrier wave signals to encode digital information for transmission and demodulates modulated signals to decode transmitted information. A modem produces a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded to reproduce the original digital data. Modems can be used with a variety of transmitters of analog signals, such as a cellular radio. A common type of modem converts the digital data of a computer into modulated electrical signal for transmission over telephone lines and demodulated by another modem at the receiver side to recover the digital data.
Modems can be used in one wireless modem application to synchronize gas meter reading and interval data to meter data management systems and AutoSol Enterprise Server (AES) software. It can also add significant value to those involved in energy measurement for billing, trading, load management, distribution engineering and custody transfer.
An industrial modem for the gas industry may comprise a multi-band LTE, UMTS/HSPA and CDMA/1XRTT digital cellular radio, cellular packet switched (IP) connectivity providing the lowest current cost communications available. Such industrial modems support operation with static or dynamic IP addresses, DES based encryption for secure IP access, over-the-air (OTA) download of operating system and configuration provides future-proofing, and programmable interval sizes: 1, 5, 15, 30, 60 min. Depending on data input configuration user defined digital outputs maybe available to provide pulse outputs or control signals to customers. The industrial modem includes a Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) card, where the electronics assembly is potted by an encapsulation material (an epoxy) to meet an Intrinsic Safe Zone 0 safety requirement.